"Sebba argues that Ethel was the victim of a combination of Cold War hysteria and bad relatives, and that she went to her death with 'dignity, confidence and courage'. Her Ethel is a 'profoundly moral woman' who 'believed she was dying to make sure that she left her sons with not simply the memory of a mother they loved but a human role model of how to live a good life'. Of course 'she could not confess to something which she had not done.' But that wouldn't have been necessary. If she had agreed to tell the government that Julius was a spy, then even after he was already dead her execution would have been called off."
At the London Review of Books, Deborah Friedell reviews Anne Sebba's Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy.
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